Users can view content authored by other users and displayed on web pages of websites. For example, users can author content about a subject, e.g., a product review or an article on politics or technology, and upload the content to a website's server. The publishers of the website can receive and display the content on a web page of the website. Many publishers allow other users, such as viewers and/or editors, to provide user feedback to rate the content displayed on the web page. Some publishers use a rating determination system to generate a content rating for the content displayed on one or more web pages of their websites and/or an author rating of the authors of the rated content. The publishers use the user feedback based rating to decide whether to display the content on their websites and/or as a general indicator of the quality of the content or the author.
When content is first authored, however, there are no user feedback based ratings for rating the content. In some systems, an initial content rating of the new content can be based on an existing author rating of the author. However, if the author does not have an existing author rating, the publishers are not able to make such a rating inference.